In October last year, a month before the Copenhagen talks on climate change, emails and documents were leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. Dubbed Climategate, it gave a handle to sceptics of human-induced climate change to accuse scientists of manipulating data to push their agenda. Investigations into the affair recently concluded that it did not change the need to act on carbon emissions. But the issue brought home the failings of climate scientists and institutions when it came to facing public scrutiny. This is something they have just not been used to since the time of Galileo, says Andrew Light, director of international
climate policy, Centre for American Progress, in an interview with
DNA
What are the lessons to be learnt for scientists from Climategate?
I think the most important thing learnt was that, whether they like it or not, the nature of the problem and the politics around it mean that there is a kind of scrutiny being paid to their work which is different than the kind of scrutiny they are normally used to in the practise of science. All of their science is now going to be in the public space and there’s no way around that.
We always wanted scientists to be better communicators to policy-makers and the public but it is now an absolute requirement that they become better communicators.
They also have to realise that everything they say is potentially part of the public record. We all have very casual ways of talking about others in daily life. I think these people have to realise that just like every public figure, every email you write is going to be on the front page of The New York Times, because ultimately their emails were on the front page of the The New York Times. I think that’s the biggest lesson. I think some of the reporting on Climategate portrayed a sort of cut-throat adversarial process. However, academic life is about not only producing your own reports. It’s also about demonstrating why other people are wrong.
What kind of different scrutiny are you talking about here?
There is a very high bar set to make a scientific claim. It has to be falsifiable and defended in the court of scientific inquiry. What is different about climate science is that the inquiry is not going to be among peers but among the general public. That’s because the decisions that we are basing on their findings have such a gigantic impact.
But the public may not understand the scientific process…
It not only does not understand the science behind climate, but also the fundamentals of science itself — how a scientific claim is made.
Scientific claims are rarely ever absolute. They are always the best inference we can make given the knowledge we have. That doesn’t mean they are a bad basis for decisions. In fact they are the best basis for taking decisions.
However, people may not understand the fundamentals of what counts as evidence for a scientist.
How can scientists then prepare themselves for such scrutiny?
There are good models already available. NGOs have started programmes that get scientists to learn how to communicate to policy-makers and the public. There is the Leopold Fellowship programme in the US which was organised by Jane Lubchenco, who is now heading the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US. So that’s a case of a far-sighted scientist who is involved in policy-making who said ‘You need an organised way of training people. You just can’t read a pamphlet or be well-intentioned or be a good public speaker. You need a process where you get trained to communicate these ideas.’ That organised kind of training has to happen among scientists.
Do you think institutions involved in climate science are transparent?
Claims were made after Climategate about how data wasn’t made available. But part of the reason the scientists were exonerated is that all the data was in fact available. You just need to know how to find it. It was just one bad email that emerged where one climate researcher is telling others to destroy all emails related to a certain thing. Nobody destroyed it anyway.
It was again scientists responding to an environment which they don’t have to respond to. Basically, they had to relearn the lessons which Galelio had to learn during the inquisition: ‘Oh I just say something -- that the earth revolves around the sun — and they think it’s true and shut me down. Scientists haven’t had to deal with that in the past 100 years or more and now they are dealing with intense pressure. This makes it appear that they aren’t transparent.
But the IPCC was shown in bad light when it came out that it relied on questionable data.
I think it is surprising that they haven’t found more mistakes in the (IPCC) report which runs over 3,000 pages, and has tens of thousands of footnotes. I know there are people going through these things with a fine toothcomb. The fact they found a handful really shows how good a job these guys did.
The reason it happened is because the IPCC fundamentally relies on voluntary labour. We need to professionalise this process. The IPCC has to be funded by a body and be administered in a way in which it is easier for people to see how these panels are organised. There needs to be a clear process through which you can settle debate such as including grey literature.
